Ever since man has congregated in groups, certain individuals have banded together for one reason or another. Today individuals are often participants in numerous groups.
Such groups include a single community, such as a town. Another group could be the members of a particular church. Another example could be all the employees at a particular business. Another group could be all of the customers of a particular grocery store. Another group could be the parents whose children are all in the same school. On a national political level, there are two rather large groups, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. This is by no means an all inclusive list. Most people are associated with several such groups in their daily course of dealings.
These groups also have leaders and/or members which disseminate or initiate the dissemination of information. In the early days of society's development, such disseminators or initiators would gather members of the group together to promulgate information. This could occur at a regular interval or in times of specific need. A similar need exists in today's groups, however, today's groups are more diverse and dispersed. Disseminators, such as political electees, priests or preachers, store owners, chief executive officers, automated or semi-automated message systems, government, neighbors and even the leadership of the parent teachers association of any given school often find themselves in need of conveying information to members of a particular group. Other people may also require or desire communication with members of specific groups at various times and for many reasons. All of these disseminators need an effective means of scheduling point (disseminator) to multi-point (group) communication.
The current methods of achieving rapid point to multipoint messaging suffers from a variety of shortcomings. For instance, point to multipoint messaging may be achieved utilizing a list serve program over e-mail systems. However, this requires the recipients of messages to have access to their computer to regularly check messages for efficient dissemination of information and each recipient is individually addressed. Most current paging devices simply permit the reception of point to point messaging and are more suitable for private communications. The paging devises that do permit multi point broadcast are not designed to be user programable. Chain telephone calling is slow and labor intensive, while broadcast media such as radio and television provide no method for recipients to filter unwanted messages.
Many types of paging software are known in the art. One paging system utilizes the computer software Basepage(tm). This off-the-shelf program can be utilized by a paging service to allow a user to input information in a standard protocol known as TAP. The information is sent to a processing station where it is transmitted. A specific pager having a specific pre-programmed CAPCODE receives this information. Some receivers, including pagers, have been developed to search FM frequencies for a particular PI code as taught in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,346,607; 5,345,606 and 5,345,605.
Some paging systems have also been formulated which allow a person having a pager to receive such information as sports scores. These pagers receive this sports information, but the known pagers are not user programmable to select or deselect to receive this information.
Instead, the pager is programmed by the service provider before being delivered to the user to receive this information. These prior art pagers do not allow the user to choose which information is received once a particular pager is selected, without vendor assistance. Furthermore, these pagers do not allow the user to choose to select from or deselect other sources to receive information.
At least one pager company is known to offer a particular pager to be programmed with up to eight CAPCODES. However, this pager must be reprogrammed by the paging company to change any or all of the CAPCODES. These CAPCODES are neither user programmable nor remotely programmable.
A need also exists to provide disaster and emergency alerts to members of a community, groups or to individuals. Such disaster information may include information on tornados, storms, floods, fires, hazardous material, or power outages and the like. These alerts may use sensors and may be automatic. Other information may be particularly important to a given community as well. Information including election day results, location of a bus along a route, traffic conditions or deaths and births in the community may be rapidly disseminated to the members of a community wishing to receive such data. Accordingly, it is a purpose of the present invention to provide a method of facilitating point to multipoint messaging and a novel receiving device utilized in this system.
Another purpose of the present invention is to provide a method of advertising.
Another object of the invention is to utilize an existing subcarrier of an FM radio station.
Another object of the invention is to allow a user to program a receiver to receive messages from selected senders. The consumer can select from many senders from which to receive messages.
Another object is to allow members of a particular group to receive messages at the same time when the message is sent only once by the sender. This can save time and money when attempting to quickly and economically communicate with members of a group. A group leader, initiator or disseminator, can send messages instantly and only once knowing that it is transmitted to every member of the group.
Another purpose of the present invention is to provide communication of a condition to at least one recipient in an automatic or semi-automatic manner.
Another object of the present invention is to allow a receiver to be at least partially programmed from a remote location.
Another object of the present invention is to provide individuals selected regional information including traffic, emergency or other information.
Additional objects and advantages of the invention will be set forth in part in the following description, or may be obvious from the description or accompanying drawings, or may be learned to practice the invention.